


A Bad Story

by Tenukii



Series: We're Going to Talk about Judy [4]
Category: The Secret History of Twin Peaks - Mark Frost, Twin Peaks
Genre: Alternative Perspective, F/M, Missing Scene, Possession, Speculation, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me-Related
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-09 00:44:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12265452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenukii/pseuds/Tenukii
Summary: Something happened to Sarah Palmer.





	1. A Time Presents Itself

**The stars turn, and a time presents itself.**

Judy chose to nest within Sarah Palmer because it was what the cliché called “hiding in plain sight.”

She had to be cautious; she knew that now.  Maybe she’d gotten careless.  Yes, she was Jowday the infinite, Jowday the eternal negative who had simply to turn her faceless head to move herself back into the world’s past.  If she made mistakes, she could go back and do it over until she got it right.

But infinite did not mean omnipotent.  Eternal did not mean infallible.  She would not be trapped in that world, she would not exist in the physical omniverse at all if that were so.

She would not have chased two Dale Coopers (or three, if she counted the fat green one) across three different worlds and lost all of them if she were almighty.

Judy had heard the doppelganger Arm’s curse across the emptiness of the space between the worlds: _“Non-exist-ent!”_   She had been drifting there, trying to rest and escape from the heavy apprehension that had been building in her ever since she realized the Cooper double, the one who bore the thing that could be called her son within him, was tracking her.  Of course he had all the knowledge of the pure Cooper, all the information Cooper would have learned from the Blue Rose team once led by Phillip Jeffries, along with twenty-five years’ worth of new leads and millions of dollars in technology.

Technology like the ridiculous glass box he’d thought could contain her.  The pure Cooper had landed there first after the doppelganger Arm cast him adrift between worlds, and Judy had almost caught up to him there—but something had swept him away again just in time.  So instead, she found herself alone there in that transparent cage, still cupping one of the Seeds in her white hands, and when she lifted her head, she sensed with her antennae two humans outside, ogling her.  Ogling her while they copulated.

As Judy stared eyelessly back at them, her body flickered back and forth in time, a few seconds into the past and future; but her mind went much farther back, more than sixty years to when Jack Parsons performed a revolting ritual to summon the goddess Babalon, whom he called the Scarlet Whore.  Parsons instead summoned Jowday into the physical universe, and eventually he paid with his life.  Now the Cooper double, it seemed, thought to use the same ritual to draw Jowday to him, using the two young humans as bait.

Judy leapt and threw herself against the inner wall of the trap.  When the wall held, she opened her mouth to a wide gape and emitted an otherworldly screech which shattered the glass.  She leapt again to land before the bait and struck out at them with quick darts of her unwieldy head.  She moved faster than a human could track and stabbed the bait with the crystalline spike hidden in the back of her throat.  When both were slain, Judy plunged back into nonexistence in pursuit of the pure Cooper.

She next tracked him to the Dark Ocean, that great expanse between the worlds—not quite nonexistence, but not a place where much got done, either.  Judy reached the waystation where the pure Cooper had gone, and she found the outer door locked and bolted against her.

Judy groaned softly in her fury and began to pound on the door.

She knew Cooper was inside; she could feel him.  She continued her pounding and rattled the rusty, dented metal door on its hinges.  It had ragged holes beat into it from some prior (or future—to Judy they were the same) assault, but they were too small for her body to pass through.  In some places, that would not have mattered, but here, the White Lodge’s will was strong enough for the door to hold her back.

Then something happened.  Judy felt a jolt, _electricity_ , and the entire waystation shuddered.  Something changed.  Judy growled and beat both fists against the door as her antennae twitched and pricked upward.  Using them, she could hear a voice: “You’d better hurry.  My mother’s coming.”

Judy drew back and threw her whole weight into the door as she raged against the one who presumed to call her “mother.”

When the door finally gave way, it was too late; Cooper had gone.  Judy stalked into the room and stood seething in its midst.  Her bare white skin prickled with the remnants of the electricity that had drawn the man through a large socket on the wall, leaving only a pair of shoes behind.  She felt also the warmth of fire, and her antennae detected the flicker of its light.  The sensations of both, fire and electricity, would have been pleasant to her under other circumstances.

As Judy faced the socket, she realized that either by some vagary of blind fate or by the guidance of the White Lodge, Cooper had found his way not just to any waystation but to a switching station.  He was now back in the human world, where the Blue Rose team still plotted to contain her.  The same world where his double stalked and plotted too.  Just when Judy had made the waiting room safe by finding the Moonchild and snatching her away, that blasted rotten-fruit-headed electrified tree had to fling the pure Cooper out, and now, _now_ someone had sent him into the very world where he could cause Judy the most harm.

Judy turned her head toward the Girl who had done this thing, the one who called Judy “mother.”  She had urged the pure Cooper on to the human world, and now she braced herself on the velvet sofa before the fire, and she watched Judy with an expression of mixed defiance and fear.  Judy’s hands clenched into fists at her sides, but then she turned away from the Girl and looked again at the wall socket instead.  The Girl did not matter.  Nothing Judy did to her would bring Cooper back, or turn time backward in that in-between world.

 _What can I do?_ Judy thought.  _I’ve lost him.  There are two Coopers now in that world, both of them with the knowledge of the Blue Rose.  And the pure one—the pure one knows about the Moonchild.  If he finds her again and then finds me—_

Judy thought of her current existence as an imprisonment.  Compared to what she had once been—a formless negative spiraling among the deadlights beyond the edges of the physical omniverse—it _was_ imprisonment.  But there were worse prisons, worse prisons even than the Girl’s tedious fireside sofa at the switching station, or the Arm’s crackling electric tree body in the waiting room, or Phillip Jeffries’s steaming spouted device at the Dutchman’s.

The double had wanted to catch her in a glass cage, and after that—she didn’t know.  But he had BOB in him, and she knew what BOB had done to the Moonchild, and that was in the body of the Moonchild’s bumbling, kind-hearted human father.  What might the flat dark soul of a doppelganger be capable of with BOB’s power inside him?

But it was the pure Cooper Judy truly had to fear, the pure Cooper she had to destroy before he found the Moonchild again, because the Moonchild was the only one who could give him the power to contain Judy.  Cooper knew it now, and now he was back in the world where the Blue Rose team schemed against her.

As soon as she thought of the Blue Rose team, Judy became aware of the blue rose itself, resting in a vase on a table to the right of the wall socket.  Judy shifted her whole body to face it and swept her antennae forward.  Its petals were a delicate, pale blue that only deepened at their tips so that the rose appeared washed out yet edged in rich color.  It bore two leaves.

She walked toward it.

Judy stopped at the end of the oblong table, with its length and the back of a chair between her and the rose.  She could smell the rose even from that distance.  Its odor was light and sweet.

Judy twitched one antenna backward over her elongated skull to find that the Girl was no longer paying attention to her.  Instead, the Girl had taken her place on the sofa once more and resumed gazing at the fire.  Judy flicked the wayward antenna back toward the rose and moved around the side of the table, coming closer to the improbable flower.

Judy leaned forward and stretched out both antennae so that their tips hovered directly over the rose, and she could sense down into its heart.  How had it come to be there?  Who had placed it there in that vase, on that table?  The Girl?  Someone from the White Lodge?  Someone from the Black?  Certainly it had been meant as a sign for Cooper.  Certainly it should awaken loathing in her, the color of its petals and the scent of its perfume, the very shape of it.  Blue Rose meant imprisonment, meant containment, meant no hope of ever shaking off this physical form and escaping back to the place she’d come from when the Babalon Working and the Trinity Test stole her away.

Judy’s mouth opened in a round snarl, and her hand darted out to slap the rose away and dash the vase to the floor.  Yet her hand froze with its long fingers splayed in mid-air a scant inch from contact, because the blue rose, _this_ blue rose, evoked none of those things.  Instead, she imagined the warm, silken caress of steam; the comforting, repetitive whirring and clanking of machinery; the rise and fall of a drawling voice singing to her and speaking her name.

Judy drew her hand back and let it fall to her side.  Then she turned away from the rose and moved back to the giant socket still humming on the wall.

She knew where the pure Cooper would go: back to Twin Peaks, where the Moonchild had been born in the body of Laura Palmer, where BOB had killed her in the body of Leland Palmer.  She knew too that the double would go there as well.  Even now, Judy’s agents were feeding him the coordinates.

 _If that is where they will go, then I will also go,_ Judy thought, _and lie in wait for the pure Cooper._

Judy lifted both antennae and held them straight out, each pointed at one of the vertical slots of the wall socket.  She crouched, bending her legs at the knees; then she sprung.  With a graceful bound, Judy leapt through the socket in a shower of sparks and a crackle of electricity.

Startled by the sudden noise, the Girl on the sofa shrieked and turned to look, but the thing she called her mother was already gone.  The Girl pressed her hand to her chest to calm her pounding heart and rapid breathing.  She gazed a moment at the socket and the pair of men’s shoes lying abandoned on the floor beside it.  Then the desk lamp beside the socket went out.  Another movement out of the corner of the Girl’s eye caught her attention, and she looked in time to see one of the petals fall from the blue rose on the table a few feet away.

The Girl shifted herself around to face forward again, toward the fire.  She lifted her left hand to check the time on her digital wristwatch.  It was three o’clock.  She dropped both hands into her lap, sat back upon the sofa, and looked once more into the flames.

\--

Judy’s naked form appeared standing upon the rock in a sizzling column of electricity.  In the instant before she stepped away, her pallid body resembled the replica Medici Venus which stood in the red-curtained waiting room; but no one else was there to marvel at it, or to stare in horror at her unwieldy head with its misshapen skull and gaping mouth.  In a few days, the double would arrive searching for the very being who stood there now, but he would come too late.

Judy jumped down and crouched beside the rock.  This was their human world, and this was Twin Peaks, one of those places riddled with thin spots where crossing between worlds became easier.  This was where the pure Cooper would come.

 _I will wait for him,_ Judy thought, _I will hide somewhere the Moonchild cannot go, somewhere he cannot bring her.  She is already dead in this time and place, so I will be safe as long as I can hide. . . ._

She pressed the palms of her hands into the gritty dirt and spread her antennae outward to take the pulse of that strange, thin place.  She had not been unknown there.  Ancient peoples had spoken the name of Jowday and scrawled the glyph which was sometimes an owl in flight, sometimes two mountain peaks, and sometimes the head of the faceless goddess of nothing.  Now Jowday was mostly forgotten, for at some point the people quit speaking of her, and when asked about her, they would reply only, “You do not wish to know about this thing.”

With her mind, she swept through the tide of life in Twin Peaks, and when she found her perfect host, Judy’s wide mouth twisted into one of its rare smiles.  She lifted her head and stood, then dusted off her hands before jumping back up atop the boulder.  She could feel the prickling of the invisible stream of electricity that had brought her to that place even before she stepped back into it again.  This time, it carried her a much shorter distance than before, only as far as a large white house in town, where a ceiling fan made lazy circles in the air and a woman’s screams lasted only a short time.

\--

After they became one, Judy did not repulse Sarah Palmer any less.  Sarah didn’t hate her any less.  But Sarah found that she knew Judy already, and worse, that she _understood_ Judy.  Sarah didn’t _want_ to understand the bitter nightmare that called her Laura “the Moonchild,” but she had one comfort: she realized things about her parasite that Judy herself did not.

Sarah never once considered that she might be insane.  She never once doubted that Judy was real.

That first night, as Sarah lay awake in bed with handfuls of the sheet twisted in her fists and sleep far away no matter how many pills she swallowed, they spat recriminations at each other.

“You let it happen,” Sarah growled into the darkness, “that thing came from you and you let him destroy her.”

**_You_ ** _let it happen.  You were married to him, and he had been raping her since she was twelve, and you somehow didn’t **know**?_

The same old guilt crashed over Sarah, like the ocean tide coming in again, night after night.  Judy wasn’t saying anything to her she hadn’t said to herself.  But, Sarah realized, Judy felt the guilt too.  She might not have castigated herself, but—

_no_

—but she felt it all the same, guilt that she never tried to destroy BOB and the other warped offspring she had vomited up.

_No, I am not responsible, and she is not mine to protect.  She was made to destroy me._

“She was innocent,” Sarah rasped.  She broke off in a fit of coughing—damn cigarettes, she should’ve quit but hell if she would bother quitting _now_ —then choked out, “You know she was, and you feel guilty—”

**_No!_ **

“And Leland. . . .”  Sarah closed her eyes and tried to think of her husband the way she wanted to remember him.  The real Leland.  She showed Judy and hissed, “This is what he was.  There was some of this left.  He cried for Laura.  That thing didn’t take all of him.”  She was crying herself now, not hard but just enough so that the tears overflowed her eyes and slipped out between her closed lids.  At first, Sarah had been too shocked and overwhelmed, and too drugged, to be angry.  But now the anger was coming through, the anger and the hatred for the monster inside her.

“I loved him—I still love him!  I still love them both!  You feel that?  Can you feel that, can you feel what love feels like?”  Sarah’s voice rose to nearly a shout.  “Or does love make you puke too, you stone cold bitch?  I hope it makes you _sick_ to feel me love them!”

She heard Judy give some inane response— _Jowday is nothing, Jowday feels nothing,_ more of that negative force bullshit—but Sarah concentrated on Laura and Leland and on loving them.  She thought about the good times, about holidays and vacations, about hugs and smiles.  She thought about Leland trying to teach her and Laura some phrase in Norwegian around the dinner table to make a good impression on visiting investors, and how all three of them dissolved into laughter over their silly lilting repetitions of the foreign words.

For the first time in weeks, Sarah Palmer smiled, and she felt as if her heart had filled to bursting.

 _That is love?_   Judy’s voice was very small within her.  _That happiness, that is love?_

“Yes, that’s love,” Sarah muttered.  Her smile shrank into something small and triumphant, something a bit petty, because now she understood something new about Judy.  When Sarah hissed her next question, she already knew the answer: “Have you ever felt happiness like that, Miss Judy?”

The monster within Sarah Palmer did not reply.

\--

To be continued


	2. Let's Rock

**Let’s rock.**

Sarah found that she and Judy had things in common.  For instance, they both liked bloody Marys.  Sarah drank her vodka straight, too, but she started buying more mix to go in it because Judy didn’t like plain liquor: the alcohol itself had no effect on her, and when Sarah was completely incapacitated, her body was useless to Judy.  So Judy drank for the taste of it, and she liked the taste of the vodka when it was blended with the tomato juice and spicy sauces and peppers.  The mix Sarah got at the store wasn’t as good as a hand-mixed cocktail, but Sarah didn’t know how to make them herself, and neither did Judy.

Anyway, the mix tasted good enough.  The drinks helped pass the time, and the flavor reminded Judy of Buenos Aires.

When Sarah got low on liquor or cigarettes, she went over to Keri’s Handi-Mart.  The selection of food at Keri’s was poor, overpriced, and not always at its most fresh, but the store was close by and, for the essentials, handy indeed.  On her first trip there with Judy, Sarah got a cart and put in two bottles of bloody Mary mix, just to be on the safe side.  She had a couple of those at home already, though, and that wasn’t the point of the excursion.

The point was the Smirnoff, but there were only three bottles on the shelf.  Sarah felt around for more just in case, but no dice.  She sighed with a tragic frown and turned her cart toward the checkout counter.  She wasn’t even _that_ upset about it—all it meant was that she might have to switch to tequila and margarita mix, or wine if she got desperate—but Judy was already restless.  She didn’t like going out, and when Sarah felt anxious, Judy picked up on that anxiety, amplified and worsened it.

“Uh, could I have a carton of Salems, please?” Sarah asked the blonde teenager working the register.  As she spoke, she forced a smile she didn’t feel.  The girl popped down and up again to get the cigarettes from under the counter, moving with the fluidity of youth, and she scanned the lime green carton in the same motion.  As the cashier reached over and grabbed the Smirnoff bottles to ring them up, Sarah’s eyes fell on a display of jerked meat hanging behind the register.

Beef jerky.  Turkey jerky.

The cashier—her name tag read “Victoria”—finished scanning Sarah’s purchases, and the rattle of the bottles made Sarah jump.  The girl smiled nervously.

“How much is it?” Sarah asked.  Her voice still sounded pleasant enough, but the false smile had dropped from her face.

“$133.70,” Victoria said with her own smile fixed in place.  The bag boy, another teenager, glanced over then tried to look busy, but Victoria shared an incredulous look with him a moment later as Sarah was paying.

“I don’t remember seeing _those_ beef jerky there before,” the older woman announced with a scowl.

Victoria glanced over her shoulder, then explained, “Uh, that’s new.”

“What type is it?”

“Uh, it’s turkey, not beef,” Victoria said.

“Is it smoked?” demanded Sarah.

“Uh, I. . . I think so,” Victoria stammered.  Now the bag boy, who was labeled “Oscar,” was eyeing Sarah too as Victoria kept on explaining, “It’s the same as beef jerky except it’s made from turkey.”  Sarah favored Oscar with the same scowl she had bestowed upon the girl; then she turned her pale blue eyes back on Victoria.

“Were you here when they first came?” Sarah asked.

“Uh, y-yes?”  Victoria gave a faint, nervous laugh.  “They brought it in a couple weeks ago.”

“Your room seems different,” Sarah went on with a slight nod.  Of course it seemed different; the last time she had been there, she hadn’t had a faceless bitch of nothingness nesting inside her.  Every little difference, even the turkey jerky, felt like a betrayal.  Sarah raised her eyes to look upward.  To the teenagers, her eyes looked large and antsy, almost frightened.  She turned her gaze askance, then suddenly looked directly back at Victoria and said in a firmer, angrier tone, “And men _are_ coming.”

Oscar and Victoria looked at one another as the girl murmured, “Uh, I’m. . . I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

Sarah grimaced then shouted, “I am trying to tell you that you have to watch out!”  She glanced over at Oscar to include him in her warning, but mostly she focused on the girl.  “Things can happen!  Something h-happened to me, hmm?  Something _happened_ to me!”  She was almost in tears by now—not tears of sorrow, but tears of frustration and anger.

Sarah turned her head aside and pushed her hand into her hair, whispering to herself, “I don’t feel good.  I don’t feel good.”  Then her voice rose to a shout, almost a scream: “I don’t feel good!  _I don’t feel good!_ ”

The teenagers exchanged helpless glances, but the older woman seemed to be talking to herself now.  She was not, in fact; something else was speaking with her voice.

“Sarah,” Judy whispered through Sarah’s mouth.  “Sarah, stop doing this.”

“Should—should I call a doctor?” Victoria was asking, but Sarah-Judy ignored her.

“Stop doing this, stop doing this,” the thing in Sarah Palmer’s body said.  She rubbed her hands together and went on, talking herself through the unfamiliar motions of an everyday human existence, “Okay.  Leave this place.  Find the car key, find the car key.”  She dug through Sarah’s pocket as she hurried Sarah’s legs toward the door.  Sarah fought her all the way out the door until Judy too was yelling in frustration, “Get the car key, get the damn car key!”

\--

Sarah had control of herself by the time Hawk came by the house later that day.  She wouldn’t have come to the door, but he knocked twice, and she knew he would just keep knocking until she answered.  She trudged to the door and opened it to look up at the man on the other side.

“Hello, Sarah,” Hawk said.  He was smiling.

“Hawk,” Sarah replied, almost in a bark.  Hawk was a good man, she knew.  Over the years, he had learned how to put on the warmth and the smiles Harry Truman had wielded so well when he wanted to put someone at ease, yet Hawk had never softened or weakened even as he aged.  He never seemed to tire either, even when Harry first started getting sick and Hawk was picking up more and more of the slack, before Frank came on the force.

Sarah didn’t _want_ to be rude to Hawk; she was just so _tired_.  All she wanted was to be left alone.  All she ever wanted anymore was to be left alone.

(And that was something else she and Judy had in common.  The entire reason Judy had come to her was because someone in particular refused to leave Judy alone.)

“Been meaning to stop by,” Hawk was saying.  “Some old cases popped up, and I thought about you.”

Only one old case might make Hawk think of Sarah Palmer, and if that had “popped up,” it probably was intimately entangled with the person who insisted on pursuing Judy.  That was Judy’s problem though, not hers.

Sarah stood with her arms folded across her chest and said, “That’s very kind of you.  But I suppose you’re really here because of what happened in the grocery store, hunh?”

“Yeah, I heard about that.  People were worried about you,” Hawk said gently.

Sarah nodded, mouth twisted to the side, then said in a flat rehearsed tone, “I just don’t know what came over me.”  She knew how it sounded, like an abused wife parroting what she always said once her husband apologized and promised he’d never do it again: _I was confused.  He didn’t hurt me.  I don’t want to press charges._

_I just don’t know what came over me._

Hawk nodded too and said, “But you’re okay now,” and she knew he knew how it sounded too.

“I feel fine now,” said Sarah in the same flat voice, with the same grimace drawing back the corners of her mouth.  Judy had not told her to say that, or any of the other things Sarah said.  Judy didn’t care _what_ Sarah said, because it did not ultimately matter.  Sarah could tell Hawk exactly what had happened, _exactly_ what had “come over” her, and it wouldn’t matter.  No one would ever believe her, not even a good man with his tireless warmth and his gentle concern.

From inside the house, the rattle of glass bottles echoed.

Hawk looked over Sarah’s head and asked, “Is somebody in the house?”

“No,” Sarah said.  Her eyes went down, moved to her left, then her right, and she turned her head to look back over her shoulder as she repeated, “No.  Just something in the kitchen.”  As she finished speaking, her eyes returned to Hawk’s face and stayed there, looking into his.  A challenge.

_Ask me **what’s** in the kitchen.  Ask me what’s there rattling the empty liquor bottles.  Ask me what, not who, because she’s a nobody, she’s a nothing, she’s a negative swallowing my soul and she’s in there cleaning the fucking kitchen._

“You’re okay then,” Hawk repeated.  He still did not believe her.

Sarah looked at him a moment; then the frustration won out, and she growled through clenched teeth, “It’s a damn bad story, isn’t it, Hawk?”  She was aware of the fury in her voice, of how she sounded like a caged wild animal.  For that moment, Sarah just didn’t care.

She stood there seething, and Hawk looked down at her with his eyes concerned and thoughtful.

Then he said, “Sarah, if you need any help, if you need anything, I want you to call, okay?  I mean it.”

She raised her eyebrows, chin down on her chest, and nodded, still skeptical in spite of his reaction.

“Help of any kind,” Hawk added.

And then she wondered.  Maybe he _would_ believe her, if she told him.  Maybe he would make the connection between the case that “popped up” and the thing that called itself Jowday, the thing that was so white on the outside and so dark within.

Yet even if Hawk believed, he couldn’t help her.  Sarah had moved past the point of help the night her husband murdered her daughter. . . the night Judy’s offspring BOB murdered the Moonchild.

Sarah nodded again to Hawk and moved to shut the door.

“Thanks, Hawk,” she said, just before she closed it between them.

\--

To be continued


	3. Like the Dreamer

**We are like the dreamer.**

Judy didn’t like going out, but Sarah went anyway one night, when she couldn’t stand the dim, cluttered living room and the flickering violence on the television any longer.  She didn’t go to the Roadhouse; she was too likely to see someone she knew there, and that would mean trouble if there was a repeat of what had happened at the Handi-Mart.  Instead, Sarah drove out to another dive and smoked as she walked up to the door.  She made a slight, unassuming figure who still hesitated before going in, because it wasn’t the kind of place a suburban housewife like Sarah Palmer patronized.

But Sarah did go in, and although she looked around at first, she ignored the curious looks she got in return.  By the time she placed her cigarettes and her lighter on the bar, Sarah felt pretty much at home.  Her brief reconnaissance of the place had reminded her that there wasn’t a hell of a lot to be afraid of anymore.  She didn’t have anything to fear from anyone there, or anywhere else for that matter.  Sarah knew Judy shouldn’t make her feel comfortable or _safe_ like that. . . but there it was.

_I’m not alone anymore,_ Sarah thought as she ordered them a blood Mary and lit another cigarette while she waited on it.  _I’ll never be alone again, I guess._

She thanked the bartender when he brought the drink.  He’d made it strong, and she liked that.  Judy liked it too, but she wanted a celery stalk in it.  Sarah didn’t usually bother with the celery at home, but Judy liked biting into it, the way it crunched under Sarah’s teeth, the saltiness of it and the way the stringy veins pulled away and the rigid stalks snapped.

_Dumb bitch, you think a place like this is gonna keep fresh celery around?_ Sarah thought as she drank.

Sarah deliberately ignored the trucker.  She’d seen him in the corner while the bartender made the bloody Mary, but she pretended she hadn’t.  Such pretense was a form of conflict avoidance which Sarah had internalized long ago: ignore the problem, and maybe it will go away.

At one time, Sarah would have ignored the predatory gaze of a big, rough man like because he would have frightened her.  Now, she just didn’t want to have to deal with the consequences.

Yet the problem showed no signs of going away, no matter how determined Sarah was to ignore it.  In fact, the problem knocked back the dregs of whatever was in his shot glass, picked up his beer bottle, and moved down the bar towards her.  Sarah cast him one disdainful glance and looked away.  Within her, Judy quit bitching about the celery.  She coiled silent and alert.

“You drinking all alone tonight?” the man asked as he wedged his flabby body onto the barstool beside Sarah.

Ah.  Irony.

“Mind your own business, please,” Sarah muttered.

The trucker chuckled mirthlessly and replied, “That’s not very polite.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow, still not looking at him directly, and said, “It wasn’t meant to be polite.”  She kept smoking while the man let that sink in.  He looked her up and down; she was half his size, if that.  He leaned forward a little, further encroaching on her space, and she closed her eyes in a long, tired blink.

“Would you sit back where you were, please?” she asked.  Sarah was still and calm, but inside her, Judy was restless.  _Not polite?  Then why do you say “please”?  Now who’s the dumb bitch?_

The trucker looked up at Sarah’s face with grey eyes as still and deadly calm as Sarah’s own.

“I’ll sit wherever I want.  It’s a free country,” he told her; then he said it again.  “It’s a free country.”

Sarah sighed.

“It’s a free _cunt_ -ry,” the trucker came up with in a fit of inspiration.  Sarah was somewhat surprised that Judy understood the innuendo since the guy’s shirt, which read “truck you,” hadn’t made sense to her.  But Judy bristled and writhed, and Sarah kept silent on the outside to keep _her_ silent on the inside.

The trucker wasn’t going to take silence for an answer.

“Maybe you’re one of them bull dykes,” he suggested.  “Yeah, come to think of it, you look kind of like a bull dyke lesbo.”

Sarah waited.

“You like to eat cunt, hunh?” the trucker laughed, again without humor.  All he could do was repeat the same sophomoric insults over and over, but he wasn’t going away, and Judy felt like she was going to burst right out of Sarah’s chest like that thing in the _Alien_ movies.

Finally, Sarah gave up and just turned Judy loose.  She looked at the trucker through Sarah’s eyes and said with Sarah’s bitter lips, “I’ll eat _you_.”

The man chuckled, “What?” in puzzled disbelief.  When Judy only smirked at him, he said, “Like hell you will, you miserable bitch.  I’ll fucking pull your little lesbo titties off.”

Judy shifted Sarah’s whole body on the bar stool to face the man head on.  Sarah’s small mouth was drawn up in disgust, and Sarah’s eyes held bitter contempt.  When the woman stood up, the trucker’s own eyes betrayed a glimmer of alarm—he obviously didn’t expect his latest victim to fight back—and he stood too.

Judy lifted Sarah’s right hand and spread it over Sarah’s face.  Then she lifted the human face away and let the man see her own face beneath it: the unbroken white expanse from her brow downward, the gaping black hole of her mouth.  The trucker’s eyes widened and moistened, and his doughy face went slack with disbelief at what he saw.  She could feel the fear and revulsion—and the utter bewilderment—washing off of him.

The trucker’s reaction was no more than Judy expected.  No human being, save one, had ever looked at Judy without horror.  No man, save one, had ever looked at her and seen beauty.  The contrast between _him_ and the monster now before Judy infuriated her further.

The spike at the back of Judy’s throat shot out from her black mouth.  From inside of Sarah’s body, Judy brought up her own white hand and palmed her own eyeless face.  She pulled that away too to show the trucker the dark within _._

“Do you really want to fuck with this?” she taunted the trucker in Sarah’s voice.  From deep inside Judy’s blackness, white teeth shone, framed by smiling lips— _her_ smile.

The trucker drew back but kept staring.  Judy had seen that stare before, on the face of Jack Parsons when he summoned the goddess Babalon but received a monster called Jowday instead.  Parsons had looked at her like that: disgusted, repulsed, yet unable to turn away.

Judy closed Sarah’s face over the Moonchild’s smiling mouth; then Judy—Jowday—the Mother of Abominations darted forward and punctured the trucker’s neck with the spike in her throat.  It plunged out of Judy’s and Sarah’s nested mouths, ripped a hole into the right side of his face and neck, and retreated when Judy sat back.

The trucker gave a choked moan of startled pain which dissolved into gurgling as blood spurted from his severed carotid artery.  Judy watched this through Sarah’s eyes and listened through her ears.  There was no blood on Sarah’s mouth, and no expression on her face.  After the trucker had fallen to the floor and twitched until he died, Judy backed down and let Sarah take over again.

Sarah didn’t have to fake a suitable reaction.  She hadn’t expected Judy to handle things quite so efficiently, and her shriek at the sight of the bloody corpse at her feet was authentic.  The scream drew the attention of everyone else in the bar, and the bartender came jogging over as Sarah backed away from the trucker’s body.

“What the hell?” the bartender gasped, turning to Sarah.  “What happened?”

Sarah gestured at the barstools and stammered, “He just fell over.  I don’t know.”

“What, with half his neck missing?  _Damn._ ” protested the bartender.  But then he studied Sarah suspiciously and asked, “You have something to do with this?”

“What?  You—you saw me!  I was just sitting here, having my drink.”  She gestured at the barstools again for emphasis.

The bartender yelled over his shoulder for his wife to call 911, then leaned in to mutter, “We’ll see about this,” to Sarah.

Judy hovered, ready to come forward if Sarah showed any signs of coming apart.  But Sarah didn’t need her.  After that one scream, Sarah had gotten a hold of herself—in her tortured lifetime, she had witnessed things far worse than a bloody corpse with a mangled neck, and she didn’t think much of anyone was going to miss Mr. Truck You anyhow.

Sarah gave the bartender a flat, dead stare and said, “Yeah.  Sure is a mystery, hunh?”  The bartender looked from her to the corpse and back again, and then he edged away from her.

The police and paramedics came and went, and the mystery remained.  An officer took a statement from Sarah Palmer, then told her she was free to go.  The bartender did not tell the officer about any of his suspicions.  Sarah paid for her drink, pocketed her cigarettes and lighter, and left the bar.  The bartender watched her go and hoped she wouldn’t come back.

\--

To be continued


	4. The Past Dictates the Future

**The past dictates the future.**

So Judy nested within Sarah Palmer for a while, hiding in plain sight.  Yet she did not lie idle, and sometimes she slipped away from Sarah, while the woman was sleeping or medicated.  Judy had things to do.

She knew that Cooper’s double wanted her.  Judy was not sure of _all_ the reasons why, but he had BOB within him, and she knew why _BOB_ wanted her: to destroy her.  Now that the Arm had “evolved” and planted himself in the waiting room, BOB could not be contained or controlled by anyone except for Judy.  Finding her, destroying her, meant his absolute freedom.

When she was not in hiding, Judy laid a trap for the double and for BOB.  After everything else had been prepared, she went to the Dutchman’s Lodge with a set of numbers for Phillip Jeffries.  She had left Sarah at night, once Sarah had drunk enough to fall asleep in front of the television.  It was always night at the Dutchman’s and inside Phillip’s dim room, and Judy felt comfortable in the darkness there.

“Eventually, the double will come to you, looking for me,” Judy told Phillip. 

“Why me?” Phillip’s voice drawled from within the device that housed him.

Judy muttered, “Because he knows you know me.  You told him that yourself, back when he was whole.  But also because he believes you have been working with him, ever since you came here.”

Phillip harrumphed in a series of mechanical whirs and clanks.  “The _impostor_.  That phony Cooper’s an idiot to buy into it—and who would wanna be _me_?  ‘Specially now.”

Judy had her suspicions about that, but she only said, “Yes.  He is a fool.  The impostor does not sound the least bit like you.”

“No?”  Despite his agitation, Phillip chuckled, and steam rippled out of his device’s spout.

“No.  No one else sounds like you.”  Judy placed one hand on the spout.  Its metal surface had been warned by the steam, and her disordered fingers curled over it.

“Ah s’pose that’s a good thing,” Phillip drawled, exaggerating the accent which made his voice so unique.  Once, Judy had asked why he sounded the way he did.  Phillip tried to explain that in the place he had been born, almost everyone sounded like that.  Yet to Judy, it remained unique, one of the things that made Phillip _Phillip_.  It was like the way his eyes didn’t match when he had a human form, and the way his touch felt, whether it was the touch of his hands or his steam.

Judy drew her hand back and told him, “Your impostor is of no consequence.  But the double—you must be wary of him.  Give him nothing but the coordinates.”

“Well of course.  But why’re you so worried about him?” Phillip persisted.  “You still trust me, don’t ya?”  He spoke almost playfully, but she knew him well enough to recognize that he was hurt.  He was still so _easily_ hurt, even in his dome of metal.  His vulnerability irritated her.

“This is your chance to prove that I can,” she snapped.

“Yes ma’am, Miss Judy,” said Phillip, sulking.  “And what then?  What if the other one, the _real_ Cooper, comes lookin’ for you?  Do I give ‘em to him, too?”

“He won’t come looking for _me_ ,” countered Judy.

“All right,” Phillip murmured.

Judy said, “I have to go now.  I’ve been away for too long already.”

“I thought you said time don’t exist here,” Phillip groused.  “And I thought you said time don’t exist for _you_.”

“Time still exists out _there_ , where _they_ are, and out there, time is growing short.”  Judy backed away from him.  “I am not be safe.”

“You’re frightened, ain’t you, Judy?”  Even though he spoke softly, Phillip’s voice startled her.  When she didn’t answer, he asked, “How long you gonna be away?”

“‘Time don’t exist here,’” she mocked him.

“Are you comin’ back?”

She could hear the clanks and whirs of his machinery coming faster, followed by the rapid hiss of steam.  He was so damn vulnerable, and she hated that about him because he was unashamed of it.  He made it seem like vulnerable was a fine thing to be.

“ _Judy._ ”  White steam crept around her feet and ankles.  Judy clenched her hands into fists against her thighs and bent her head.

“Yes,” she said.

The steam wafted higher, up to Judy’s knees then past her thighs and hips to encircle her waist.

“Make it soon, hunh?”

Judy quirked her antennae at his device.  The steam coming from his spout refracted the light into a circular spectrum, a thin halo of color, but Judy didn’t have the cultural baggage required to equate him with an angel.

A ribbon of steam curled up along her neck, and she swatted at it, growling, “That tickles, Phillip.”

“Does it, now,” he purred.  More curlicues of steam slid over her skin with the lightest of touches that made Judy shiver.  She knew what he was doing: he wanted her to smile.  For some bizarre reason, he liked seeing her alien mouth form that expression equally alien to it.

So she smiled for him.  Phillip stopped the tickling and caressed her instead.  Judy shivered again.

“Judy—”

“Phillip, I’m going,” she interrupted.

Judy did not really want to retreat into the bitter loneliness of Sarah Palmer, but neither did she want to hear what Phillip wanted to say.  Yet before she departed, he drew the coils of steam up the sides of her face and elongated skull, curled them over her antennae, and whispered without voice directly into her mind.

_I love you, Judy._

\--

In the end, Judy found that she had been careless: while plotting against the double, she neglected the pure Cooper.  When the double was dead and BOB destroyed, Cooper did go to Phillip Jeffries.

Sarah was getting ready for bed when Judy felt the change.  She felt it in Sarah first, because her memories altered: abruptly, her daughter had not been murdered twenty-five years before, she had disappeared.  Not too much else changed, not for Sarah nor for anyone else in the town.  The small world of Twin Peaks still shattered with Laura Palmer gone.

Yet for Judy, the change meant everything.  She felt it rippling from Sarah’s mind and spreading outward through the town, the state, the whole planet and the omniverse, because now the Moonchild still lived in this place and time and reality.  At any moment she could walk up to her mother’s door and blink her wide blue eyes and rip Judy apart.

The force of Judy’s grief and fury and anguish drove Sarah down within herself, cowering.  From deep within Sarah’s chest came a wordless, inhuman cry sounded not in Sarah’s voice, but in Judy’s.  Judy continued to wail and moan as she struggled to understand, but understanding would not come.  Finally, she gave up and simply raged.

In Sarah’s body, Judy staggered moaning into the living room where she scooped up Laura’s photograph.  Sarah had kept that portrait out in a frame for twenty-five years.  Now it became the target of Judy’s wrath.

Judy stumbled across the room and knocked over more pictures, hardly able to control Sarah’s body in her anger.  She dropped to Sarah’s knees with the portrait of Laura on the floor before her; then she snatched up the first weapon that came to hand—an empty vodka bottle.  Judy clutched the bottle in one of Sarah’s hands and pounded the blunt end against the picture, over and over.  Time flickered around her; bits of glass shattered off the frame and flew into the air, returned and rejoined, then separated again; Judy crossed back and forth into the future and the past as she raged.

One thought filled her mind and overwhelmed her being: _moonchild moonchild moonchild moonchild MOONCHILD!_

When Judy’s rage had burned itself out, she sat slumped over the shattered frame and wrinkled photograph and broken bottle.  Sarah was gone for the time being, withdrawn entirely as she did when she could not cope with Judy’s presence.  Judy took deep breaths with Sarah’s lungs, closed Sarah’s eyes, and sought to understand what had happened.

It was Cooper, always Cooper.  Cooper taking the Moonchild’s hand.  Cooper leading her away from BOB and her death.  Cooper pulling her toward a place he dared to call their home.

But how had Cooper come to be there?  This was not the young Cooper living in that time, the one Phillip met just before he gave himself to her.  This was the aging Cooper of twenty-five years later, the one who knew how to save Laura’s life.

 _MIKE, he sent Cooper there,_ Judy thought.  Of course MIKE would meddle.  But how had MIKE known just where and when to send Cooper?  The exact time, the exact place where it would be neither too early nor too late, where Laura would listen to him and follow where he led.

Judy knew the answer to that too.

“Phillip, _why?_ ” she hissed aloud, but she had no answer to _that_ question, and it was not safe for her to stay within Sarah Palmer any longer.  Sarah’s eyes fell closed and her head dropped forward once Judy had withdrawn.  When Sarah returned to consciousness some time later, she would awaken there, alone.

\--

Laura had only ever seen Judy as a void.  To Laura, Judy— _Jowday_ was nothing more than what she had been out beyond the edges of the omniverse, before the Trinity Test and the Babalon Working had given her form and existence.  She was a swirling vortex of nothingness, and over and over she had drawn Laura into her depths.  Laura felt Jowday existed for one purpose only: to snatch Laura away from whatever small comforts she managed to find in her tortured existence.

In the waiting room of the Black Lodge, the being that had once been Laura Palmer knew what Jowday really was.  Yet on February 23, 1989, the tired and frightened girl who still was Laura Palmer did not.

When the man in the suit appeared to Laura, she felt hope for the first time she could remember.  She had seen him before in her dreams, and she trusted him.  When he said they were going home, she _believed_ him, so she took his hand and followed where he led her.

And then Jowday came, making no more sound than the scratch of the needle against a record.  The vortex descended and snatched Laura away.  Laura’s screams echoed through the dark woods, and when the man who had come to take her home looked back, his hand was empty.

\--

To be continued


	5. Epilogue

**Epilogue.**

When the black mist began to filter into Phillip Jeffries’s room at the Dutchman’s, no steam was seeping from his device’s spout.  The device clanked from time to time, however, and a voice within could be heard singing in an exaggerated southern accent.  The voice sounded tinny and far away as it sang:

_Although I wasn’t there, he said I was his friend_  
_Which came as a surprise, I spoke into his eyes_  
 _I thought you died alone, a long long time ago_

A white figure flickered into existence, standing upright within the mist.  When it stopped flickering and held steady, it listened to the singing with the pair of antennae twitching atop its elongated skull.

_Oh no, not me,_ purred the voice within the device, singing with a carelessness that did not quite hide its trembling.  _I never lost control.  You’re face—to. . . face—_   The voice broke off and did not continue.

Judy stood outside the device and waited.  Her arms hung at her sides, long fingers still against her outer thighs.  Her antennae remained motionless, for there was nothing to hear nor see nor smell.  Phillip was aware of her presence, she knew, but he was afraid of her.

Before she had lived within Sarah Palmer, Judy sometimes noticed that Phillip feared her, but she had dismissed that fact as inconsequential.  Now, it bothered her.  Now, she knew what human fear felt like, so different from her own.  Human fear was so much _more._

Phillip had far less fear than Sarah, but he was still afraid.  He was afraid of _Judy_ , and his fear hurt her—not with physical pain, but a pain imaginary yet so very real, somewhere between her antennae and at the same time in her chest.  Sarah had as much hurt as she had fear, and Judy had learned how to hurt from her.

“Phillip—” Judy began, but she stopped when her voice broke.  Judy raised her right hand to her throat and touched it.  It ached inside.

“Judy?”  Finally, a trickle of steam drifted out of Phillip’s spout.  When his accented voice spoke her name from within his machinery, Judy’s antennae twitched toward the source of the sound.  “Judy, I never wanted to hurt you.  I told Cooper what he wanted to know without askin’ why—I didn’t realize—I should have known.  I’m sorry.”

Judy dropped her hand and clenched its fingers into claws which she pressed into her outer thigh as she muttered, “If you had not helped him, he would have found her another way.  It was not your fault.”

Phillip’s steam spread out across the floor until it reached her ankles.  Now she could not feel as much fear from him; he seemed to believe she had forgiven him.  Then, she realized, she had.

_Forgiveness?_ Judy asked herself.  Maybe that was something else she’d learned from Sarah Palmer.  When the steam grew warmer and encircled her calves, coaxing her closer, Judy went to Phillip and put both palms flat against the side of his device.  She could feel his machinery thrumming under her touch.  She dropped her head forward until her brow rested against his side.

Judy muttered, “I sent her away, but it will happen again.  Cooper will find her again.”

“You can’t keep runnin’ from her forever,” Phillip said, “chasin’ her down then runnin’ from her then chasin’ her down again.”

“I _can_ ,” Judy hissed.  “You know I can.”

“Well, maybe so.  Maybe you can do anything you want.”

Judy turned around and sank to the floor, sliding her back down his device’s side until she sat leaning against it.  His white steam engulfed her body and made her feel warm.

_Even now, Cooper is starting over.  He’s leaving the waiting room, and he’s going to find the Moonchild.  Even now, it’s happening again._

Judy turned her head to the side and rested it against the clanking, whirring machine behind her.

“Phillip?”

“Yeah, Miss Judy?”  The steam embraced and caressed her.

“Sing to me,” Judy whispered; then she added a word she hardly knew how to say.  “Please?”

Phillip had a good voice, even with the accent, even coming from within the device.  He began again the song she’d heard when she entered.  As he sang to her, Judy felt as much peace as she ever could while she kept chasing and running and chasing, over and over.

_Oh no,_ Phillip sang in a tinny murmur, _not me, I never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.  I laughed and shook his hand and made my way back home. . . ._

Judy thought of Sarah Palmer and her scattered happy memories of her husband and daughter.  Sarah’s heart had filled with joy just to recall them, and she had used those memories against Judy because they were proof of Sarah’s love for her family—love that had endured despite all she had suffered.

_That happiness, that is love?_ Judy had asked, incredulous.  She thought she knew what happiness was, but she believed it to be something petty and bitter.  Or if not always petty and bitter, happiness was always something small and inconsequential.

_Yes, that’s love,_ Sarah had replied.  And then, because she could be petty and bitter too, Sarah had added, _Have you ever felt happiness like that, Miss Judy?_

Phillip sang on, _I searched for form and land, for years and years I roamed.  I gazed a gazeless stare at all the millions here._

Judy _had_ felt happiness like that.  She felt it when he sang, when he teased her and tried to make her smile, when he exaggerated his accent because he knew she liked it, when he touched her.  When he condensed himself back into a human form and held her, even though she pretended it was tedious.  He made her happy—the first and only time she felt such an emotion—but Judy had always thought that was small and inconsequential.

_It **is** ,_ Judy told herself.  _Being happy with them and loving them didn’t help **her** , and it won’t help me either.  It doesn’t mean anything at all._

Nevertheless, Judy sat there and felt Sarah Palmer’s happiness as the thing which had once been Phillip Jeffries sang:

_We must have died alone, a long long time ago.  Who knows?  Not me.  We never lost control.  You’re face to face with the man who sold the world._

\--

The End


End file.
